Two interesting points from newsletters on Ukraine last week.

The first is regarding security guarantees in Europe from Phillips O’Brien’s The Two Futures

What this war has shown is that there are two realities for a European state: being a full NATO member covered by article 5—and everything else.

Russia’s aggression has consolidated NATO but leaves those outside the alliance exposed and with no real choice but to seek inclusion at some point in the future. The article also comments how Russia goes out of its way to avoid provoking an alliance reaction that will crush its remaining conventional force.

The other was about the strange double-standards on Russia’s ineffective offensives from Lawrence Freeman in Why “not losing” is not tantamount to winning.

Whatever limited progress has been made has come at an enormous cost. Zaluzhny claimed on 10 November that Russia had suffered some 10,000 casualties since 10 October, and had lost over 100 tanks, 250 other armored vehicles, about 50 artillery systems and seven Su-25 aircraft.

Even allowing for some exaggeration these are staggering losses, which if experienced by Ukraine would have led to gloomy questions about their ability to stay in the fight, and the wastefulness of their tactics. Somehow it is now assumed that in an unaccountable system, with soldiers taken from minorities and the poor, these casualties barely register in Russian society and cause no political backlash.

I’ve been wondering why when Ukraine suffers losses “realists” start talking about some fantasy of a land deal that will be acceptable to Russia but when Russia loses material that makes it difficult to continue to project any power globally there are not demands for Russia to start to specify attainable war aims.

There is something unpleasant in the idea that all these lives lost in fruitless offensives are meaningless and of no consequence to their own people. The article talks about the signs of change in the Russian attitude to the war and I can’t believe that a country can continue to lose at this rate and it has no impact.

Clearly democracies with citizen soldiers need to think about casualties differently to systems that are inherently coercing compliance. Ukraine needs to think about how to conserve itself as a nation. However it has been a long time since we’ve seen an imperial power manage to maintain control of an unwilling population. For the defenders not losing looks a lot more like victory than the occupiers.